As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
Increasingly, information handling systems have utilized on-demand desktop streaming (ODDS) and other similar methods. ODDS is an approach used to provide a single, standard desktop image (e.g., an operating system and one or more application programs) to information handling systems from a network service. Because the shared image may be configured, delivered and managed centrally, costs associated with maintaining the network of information handling systems may be minimized, while providing greater security and flexibility. In an ODDS implementation, individual information handling systems are often communicatively coupled to one or more provisioning servers. The one or more provisioning servers are generally configured to manage input/output (I/O) communications between the individual information handling systems and a storage array communicatively coupled to the one or more provisioning servers. For example, because a user of an information handling system may write data specific to that user and not common to the shared image, an individual write space may be created for such user-specific data. Accordingly, the one or more provisioning servers may create and/or manage the user-specific write spaces, and may present a user of an information handling system with the shared image and any user-specific write space such that the user may be presented a private copy of the shared image and write space.
To ensure high availability of ODDS and similar approaches, two more provisioning servers may be employed. The use of multiple provisioning servers allows operational redundancy, such that in the event of a failure or fault of one provisioning server, another provisioning server is available to provide I/O access to information handling systems in an ODDS configuration. However, in order to support access to individual write spaces and a shared image using multiple provisioning servers, the shared image and write spaces are often managed by the provisioning servers as files in a clustered file system. Clustered file systems are often expensive to implement, and may render high-availability ODDS implementations economically infeasible in many situations.